“Your mom’s friend called,” she said. “There’s been a change in your sister’s status.” She began twiddling with a spool of new thread. “She said to stay put. She’s coming to pick you up.”
Mom had never been inside the rug shop, let alone called me there. Someone must have gone to the trouble of looking up the number, which even I didn’t know. All of which was strangely wrong, because for what ridiculous purpose would I need to be chauffeured anywhere on any occasion?
“Is she all right?” the General’s wife said.
“It’s her heart.” Our euphemism for Caitlin’s past attempts. “She has a condition.”
I was out the door.
Oakwood Hospital was a couple miles from the rug shop, across the street from Stout Middle School where Will and Caitlin and I had done time. I’d skipped class to steal desserts from Oakwood’s cafeteria. Caitlin had been born at Oakwood; I’d had hernia surgery there before I knew my name. Pulling into the hospital driveway, I couldn’t imagine what change could have taken place. Yet I was familiar with the emotionless calm spreading through me. Behaving with a mind of its own, my car circled the block-long complex twice before the visitor parking area loomed ahead.
From here you could see the building my dad worked in: an old engineering compound surrounded by a cement fence, the slope of a Ford Motor test track rising above the barricade across Oakwood Boulevard. He’d driven Caitlin and me up that hill in a premarket Thunderbird; his crew had been updating the car’s transmission system. He’d gunned the engine, handling the machine as if he’d scrapped it together by hand, Caitlin and me cheering as he hugged the track’s corners.
Dad walked into the hospital not long after I did to find me wandering the hallways in a panicked search. Caitlin had been moved from the psych ward. I hadn’t wanted to ask for help, but Dad badgered the staff as though every second mattered, shouting, “Where’s my daughter?” He wore a suit, was sweating around the collar. Seeing him in a jacket and tie allowed me to cling to the sense that there was still order, an official procedure.
We were led to an elevator, then into a conference room where Mom was seated at a roundtable of nurses and doctors. No one said a word. Behind us, Mom’s friend barged in short of breath and, seeing that I’d found my way, composed herself.
We all looked to one another like we didn’t want to know what might come next. I could tell Mom already knew more than anyone. She was dressed in public-school attire: a dark blue blouse; clip-on earrings, in case her autistic students were inspired to snatch them. Her fist was pressed to her mouth. She turned her head the slightest bit, saying hello to me with her eyes.
“Cyn,” my dad said. But he didn’t ask.
I felt Mom guiding my thoughts, assuring me this wordless prelude was necessary.
Dad and I took our seats. Then Mom related the details.
Caitlin had rolled her IV into a private shower that morning, pulling the needles from her arms and using the plastic tubes to tie a noose, which she fastened to the shower rod as the water ran. By the time the nurse burst in, Caitlin had been down for ten minutes.
She’d been “down”—that’s how Mom said it.
I chose then and there to picture my sister on the floor, silently collapsed. To this day I picture that, only that, but for horrific split-second frames that flash unbidden like lightning. And then, I see only partially.
“She’s alive, though,” I said, insisting it.
Dad wheezed, staring at nothing, like a man blinded by a punch to lungs.
“Caitlin’s unconscious,” Mom said. “But they’re doing all they can. To restore brain activity. And the only thing we can do right now is pray for her.”
Next, a doctor spoke. Caitlin had been moved to intensive care. They’d revived her pulse and were feeding her oxygen. There’d be tests once the swelling in her brain subsided. He gave no indication about the odds of survival, but that didn’t alter my belief that she’d come to. I’d seen movies about this sort of thing, where a person awakes from a comatose sleep, instantly restoring harmony to the universe. She’d open her eyes. She’d laugh an exhausted laugh, and we’d cry our faces dry, and the idea of that sweet moment of relief was my only endurable thought. I couldn’t feel my fingers.
Dad’s bottom teeth protruded, the sound of air sucking through them audible as he breathed quick and shallow. All essence had drained from his eyes. He appeared clenched inside his creaseless black suit. I didn’t know it then, but the delusion of being immune to life’s consequences was the most significant thing I’d inherited from him. We were both immersed in a similar kind of self-important denial. It was about us—about what we had and had not done. Yet it was the technical details, the mention of tests and the chemistry of Caitlin’s brain, that became too much for him to endure. He moaned in a way that shook his whole body. When I reached out, he grabbed my hand.
Mom asked the smart questions: about the science, past cases, medications, the neurological assessments, the strategies. She said, “I want you to make sure the person who found her doesn’t blame herself. We want them to know we don’t blame anyone.”
The nurses and doctors bowed their heads.
Which was when I realized that Caitlin had been trapped in a place where her guardians had failed to protect her from herself—the one thing they were supposed to do.
ANGELA ARRIVED BY TRAIN the next day. I met her at the Michigan Avenue station, a couple hundred yards up the track from where Will and I once set pennies and homemade explosives on the rails, waiting for the trains to pummel them. Angela’s eyelids were swollen; she was buttoned inside a peacoat and carrying a schoolbook. We’d loved each other less than a year, but she was there completely, gripping my arm, ready to follow me through.
On our way into the ICU she met Lauren, who was sobbing hard after having seen Caitlin strapped to a gurney, a ventilator pushing air into her chest. “She’s pretty,” Angela said, once Lauren had walked away, covering her face with a sleeve. The silver watch she’d given my sister was now stowed in a plastic bag, along with her clothes and shoes and the Oscar Wilde, which I’d never open again.
For two days, the ICU was crowded with a revolving cast of the people closest to us. My dad’s eight siblings came and went, as did two of Mom’s four brothers. Her youngest brother’s wife was due to give birth any day in Pittsburgh; her oldest brother, whom I’d met twice, called from Arizona. Those who visited brought bagels and soda and flowers. There was a clutter of roses and a small feast arranged in paper bags inside Caitlin’s hospital room, where Mom sat in a plastic chair, clasping the hand of everyone who approached her. Their eyes glazed over, and what they saw of Caitlin turned them gray, but few wept in front of us. They wanted to offer strength or were acknowledging that if anyone was allowed to go to pieces it should be us. When Dad could bear to stand inside the room at all, he held Caitlin’s hand and swept the hair from her face. Never lasting more than a few minutes before he’d collapse against the wall and stagger out, the power of his sobs echoing down the hallway.
Eventually, Will and Andrew arrived. They hugged my parents. I’d never be sure what they said to me or how long they stayed. There was no logic, no order to what I saw or heard. My mind chopped the hours into hunks of imagery I might or might not remember, each memory unsequenced, out of time in the fluorescent hospital glare.
I peeled open Caitlin’s eyes, in which blood had coagulated like red mucus. I stared into them as deeply as I could. Minutes would pass, and I’d begin to feel I was floating in the blue of her irises—I’d heard that, like snowflakes, no two were the same. Caitlin’s were flecked with gold. I brought my face within centimeters, micrometers, searching for life, then swimming deeper into the blue, pleading with her soul, trying to coax her from whatever darkness she’d been lost to. Mom might have sat there behind me. Angela might have been on my arm, but I wouldn’t have known. Caitlin’s eyelashes grazed mine. I whispered to my sister, right into her temple. I told her I lov
ed her. Again and again, like a promise.
AFTER FOUR DAYS, THE doctors announced that a neurological assessment would be made the following morning. The evening before the tests, I wound up alone with Caitlin. All this time she’d been propped upright in a seated position, her head elevated to allow for proper blood flow. They had it ice cold in there because she’d been sweating with a high fever. I was several feet from her, wearing my coat and sitting in a chair near the door. Someone had placed a pink flower in her hair. Her bruised throat was exposed and looked to be straining from the tubes inserted between her chapped, purple lips. The hospital was silent but for the machines.
Mom must have been at home, showering and feeding Ozzy. I didn’t know where Dad had gone, or Angela. We’d all been in and out, seeking the relief of the world outside once the hospital left us boneless and morbid. In the ICU, we were scavengers of faith, bottom-feeders for god’s mercy. Privately, we offered ourselves in place of Caitlin—gracelessly, shamelessly. Except for my mom, whose strength seemed fortified by whatever endless prayer she was reciting.
A bottle was nestled between my legs. I hadn’t eaten, but I’d been buying beer from a drugstore up the street. I stared at Caitlin across the room, over the ridges her toes formed beneath the blue sheets. You pray at a time like that, whoever you are or whatever words you use. Your mind speaks a madness to itself, a barely subliminal chorus doing everything it can to become thoughts. You doubt the laws of the natural world. You could convince yourself of just about anything. I was terrified to approach her, but I did, and then it was the two of us. The only song that came to mind was “Pretty Woman,” and I sang it softly, the few words I knew, and it was the closest I’d felt to her since we were children.
When a nurse arrived to administer another round of medication, I awoke with my head on Caitlin’s stomach. I’d fallen asleep on my feet.
“Talk to her,” the nurse said. “It helps.”
I sang as the nurse injected something into the IV. It wasn’t minutes later that Caitlin gurgled and her eyes flashed open mechanically, two dilated black marbles staring away into nothing as I grabbed her wrist and called her name. I thought a miracle had occurred, that it had been my doing. Then her eyes closed up, and she gasped several times, a low, wet, chalky noise rattling out through her unmoving lips.
“What is this?” I said. “What’s happening?”
And the nurse said, “It’s okay … she’s not in pain … I just now gave her plenty of medicine.”
I remained there in the morning, slumped in a chair beside my parents as a neurosurgeon explained that the tests had failed to reveal brain activity. None of us believed it entirely because there was Caitlin’s heart, blipping on the screen. Her bare hands, colder than usual but so soft they felt like new. The scant freckles on her throat, her chest, rising with each huff of the ventilator. Her living body, the girl whom I’d tickled to tears, piggybacked around the yard; who used to lick her finger and stick it into my ear—this is what I suddenly remembered: two of us in the backseat of a car, her wagging a glistening finger and grinning, awaiting my move. Yet I was being asked to understand it’s merely science, synaptic activity inside her skull that determines whether or not she exists.
THE HOSPITAL GAVE US as long as we wanted to decide what would happen next. The following day, after another surgeon ran more tests and explained the situation in precisely the same way, there was only one decision to make—about which my parents consulted me, as though we had a choice.
Before the machines were unhooked from Caitlin’s body, we each took our time saying good-bye. I’d been told that when someone dies, their spirit exits their body and hovers above, witnessing all that is happening below. Much later, my mom would tell me she’d fallen asleep one night in the ICU when my sister was wrapped in cooling blankets, running dangerously high temperatures—erratic blood pressure and a pounding heart—and that she’d been awoken from a dream by an uncanny feeling of peacefulness. She’d watched Caitlin’s vitals changing swiftly on the monitors, her heart rate calmed by something unknown, her body relieved of suffering. As I hugged my sister, prying wide her eyelids and wringing every last wish and prayer from my mind, pushing them through my eyes and into her hers—I worried she’d escaped before any of us arrived. If she’d floated above, I was almost certain she’d done so alone.
From the steps of Howe-Peterson Funeral Home, the upper-flat apartment was nearly visible in the distance, three blocks west on Michigan Avenue. The weather was January muck, a dusky sky in which you couldn’t tell morning from noon, and what Christmas lights remained dangled unblinking from the nearby storm gutters. Andrew and I were standing there, staring across the avenue, when I said, “Sun looks like it might poke out here soon,” because a feather of light appeared to be scratching through.
“Crazy, that light we’re seeing happened eight minutes ago,” he said.
And I said, “Yeah,” because all those people gathered inside—lost friends and old neighbors, elementary-school teachers, nieces and nephews, my parents’ coworkers, Lauren and family, Lady Grandma and Papa, shivering although it was not cold—all those impossible minutes within the funeral home, they were like that, too: figments that had happened at some other time and were now flashing before me, reflections of another dimension that hadn’t been meant for anyone.
A wake—some called it a memorial service.
None of it seemed real.
I had the pure and sincere feeling there might still be an alternate route, a loophole through which I might travel in order to rearrange events. Inside the chapel there was no music, only the drone of sad whispers. I’d been drinking, not eating, and had lost almost entirely any notion of time. My parents spoke in alien tones I’d never before heard, greeting one by one all who arrived. The room fell silent whenever one of us made our way to kneel before Caitlin. Some broke into tears as Dad kissed my sister’s head; his brother Dennis led him shaking into the hallway. Mom told stories about my sister’s childhood, reminding us who she was, trying to honor her daughter’s life any last way she could.
Who she was, who she’d been …
Caitlin’s body was displayed in a lavender sweater, a white scarf wrapped around her neck. Flesh-toned makeup caked her face. A rosary had been woven between her fingers. But whatever had happened hadn’t really happened just yet. Even as I touched her hand, nothing could convince me.
Warden had arrived as early as anyone, wearing a cable-knit sweater, his hair damp with what looked to be Vaseline. From the band, only Ethan showed, hurrying off after sampling a buffet outside the visitation room. The members of Wallside bought me pitchers at a pizza joint across the street. Whenever I looked for her, Angela was at my side, pretty and winter pale in a black dress. Will and Andrew were there in shifts, one of them always nearby.
Late that afternoon, Caitlin’s friend Sheila entered wearing black. She had two-toned, crimped hair and firecracker eyes, kind of like her father, whom I walked toward, staring as if he held the only available truth inside that room. Caitlin surrounded us: in collages and framed portraits, crayon drawings our young cousins had placed near her coffin. Sheila’s father gazed uncertainly back at me. He might not have known a thing about New Year’s Eve, but I noted that his son was not among us. Sheila covered her eyes with a tissue. And when the moment became so bizarre that I felt uncertain of who he was, or where we were, I told him I’d like to have a word with him and his son, once all this was over.
A day later, Mom’s arm was hooked into mine as I escorted her down the aisle of the Dearborn church she and my dad were married in. Dad walked to my left, a hand on my shoulder. And when Mom stumbled I braced her, urging her forward as she said for the first and only time, “I can’t do this.” The eulogy she read was sweet and specific, a vastly different vision of Caitlin that in the end amounted to pretty much the same as mine: her kindness, her force of soul—keep it with us as long as we live.
CAITLIN’S ESCORT REMAINED AT th
e curb outside Mom’s house. On the windshield was a bouquet of pink flowers, the stems tucked beneath a wiper. One morning, lying with Angela on the living room’s pullout bed, I watched through the curtains as Lauren walked to the porch and set a care package on the doormat, along with the first of many cards she’d leave there over the years. Dad slept a few nights beside my mom, and what would have been their twenty-sixth anniversary came and went. In the early morning, he could be heard mindlessly singing Beatles songs or weeping at the sight of bobby pins and winter hats. Intending to make arrangements for my sister’s headstone, he barely opened the phone book before he began attacking it in the living room. He flailed among the torn pages as I sat on the couch, the two of us alone, dozens of flowers cluttering the windows.
“Stop,” I told him, because I couldn’t stand to be there, or to leave his side.
Dad took his hair in his fists, wrestling with his grief, which soon left him annihilated on Mom’s fake Chinese rug. “I don’t know how much longer I’ll be alive,” he said, curling on a side. “But at the hospital, I promised Caitlin I’d never use a drug again.”
Over the course of these days, Angela was getting to know these stunned versions of my parents, who were grateful to know she’d be with me through the nights. She held me in a severe new way. She looked me in the eye without hesitation, saying the kindest things, whispering, because the house was otherwise silent. Once Angela returned to Kalamazoo, I spent weeks lying in my sister’s bed, examining the contents of her drawers and staring into her portable television. I caught up on every mind-numbing program I’d missed over the years, and each time I’d think of Caitlin, there’d first be an instant in which I schemed to bring her home—springing her from the hospital, taking her by the arm as we charged out the doors.
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